Information and Imagery from Ukraine

Arkhyp Kuindzhi

Portrait of Arkhyp Kuindzhi by Ilya Repin (1877)

Arkhyp Ivanovich Kuindzhi (1841-1910) was born in Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine, the son of a poor shoemaker. Orphaned in early childhood, he survived by doing odd jobs. In his early adulthood he lived and worked in Taganrog as a retoucher in a photo studio before moving to St. Petersburg in 1865. He helped the group of Russian realist artists known as the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) who protested academic restrictions by forming a cooperative, which in 1870 became the Society for Traveling Art Exhibitions. Kuindzhi became a landscape painter and used intense light and color to depict illumination. He was influenced by the great seascape artist Ivan Aivazovsky. Pavel Tretyakov acquired Kuindzhi’s landscape painting ‘On the Salaam Island’ in 1872. His painting ‘The Snow’ received the bronze medal at the International Art Exhibition in London in 1874. In 1897, Kuindzhi was fired as a professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts for supporting student protests.